Service ~Izak Murphy

Whenever you do community service, you know that you have helped someone in some way. The biggest project that the kids in our SIA group have done was probably organizing the open table can drive. This doesn’t seem like a very big thing but it really is. The amount of food we had before and after the 9th grade got involved is a massive difference. Before there were maybe 2 boxes filled a little with some food. After we stepped in and started urging people to get involved and getting involved ourselves, there were many, many more full boxes. I myself went to a grocery store with another 9th grader and we stood outside for at least 3 hours and collected donations from people going in and out of the grocery store. It was a very great experience because every time someone puts a donation into the box, you know that that’s another person that can eat. It’s really great to collect food and things like that because you know that every little bit helps and for each box of pasta we got, there would be someone in a little bit who didn’t have enough food being very grateful for something we take for granted like a box of pasta. I think that another massive thing that we learned is that the little things that are we always take for granted like canned food can make a huge difference in someone’s life. A can of beans could be the difference to someone between starving and not being as hungry whereas to us it’s just something that sits on the pantry shelf waiting until we’re hungry enough to make beans. Our group has not done any world changing projects but I like to think that we are changing the world one little bit at a time. I think that the most defining moment in our group’s community services this year would probably be again the open table food pantry can drive the organization. The biggest moment fro that would be when we got together as a grade and were looking at how much food we had gotten so far and realized that there really wasn’t much and that we really needed to step in and get people motivated to donate. We were all in a meeting together and were not really getting anywhere until we all came to a stop and realized just that. We had a little time left and in that time we really came together as a group and figured out what we could do. We had groups working on posters to put up, we had groups at the pick up and drop off area talking to people, we did a presentation the other grades in all school meeting, the 9th grade class went to the 4th grade classes and talked to them about what they could do because the 4th graders were usually the readiest and willing to help, and we had an assortment of other groups doing other things to spread the word and get people motivated. I think that our efforts really paid off and we did a very good job. I think that if we can do this more on our own and not need a lot of people to do this and more people are already motivated than we would have a lot fewer problems in the world because there would be so many more people willing and ready to help out the people that needed it.